Time and the Digital

An original consideration of the temporal in digital art and aesthetics
Eschewing the traditional focus on object/viewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barker’s Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, Barker strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity.
Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

This book was completed while I was employed as a research fellow at the
iCinema Research Center, the University of New South Wales. I would
like to express my deepest gratitude to Dennis Del Favero, the center’s
director, an artist with unique and unrelenting vision, and an extremely
generous and supportive individual. I would also like to thank Anna...

Introduction

Time, although experienced by everyone and everything, is a
notoriously difficult concept to come to grips with. After all, it is always
moving, changing, and escaping our grasp. In the fourth century Saint
Augustine, in his theological ruminations on God’s relationship to time,
wrote, “For what is time? Who can briefly and easily explain it? . . . So...

1 | Experimenting with Time

In Serres’s description of the late-model car, we see an image
of presentness constituted by a drawing together, or assemblage of,
what he terms “the pleats of time.” In essence this is a multi-temporal
assemblage, taking form in the present. The object of the late-model car...

2 | Time and Process

For Heraclitus, as well as for Whitehead and Deleuze, reality is not
a constellation of stable things but of processes, which cannot be substantialized
into a priori things or substances. For these process thinkers it is
not the stable things but the fundamental forces and the fluctuating activities
that constitute reality.1 For instance, in relation to the theories of...

3 | Deleuze’s Time and Serres’s Multi-temporality

Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s ideas resonate most powerfully in
the way both thinkers attempt to move beyond conventional ideas about
the “subject” and to understand the world beyond the usually privileged
position of the conscious human mind. To this end Deleuze invents the
concept of the virtual, as an entirely real but not actual level of existence....

4 | The Time of David Claerbout, Bill Viola, and Dan Graham

For the artists David Claerbout, Bill Viola, and Dan Graham, the
re-presentation and experience of time are central to the aesthetics of
their work. As already mentioned, I use the term “re-presentation” to
link the concept of representation to time, to emphasize the artistic act
of presenting again, presenting for a second time, in this case presenting...

5 | Events & Interactive Aesthetics

In the previous chapter, using Claerbout, Viola, and Graham, I
cited various examples of the way in which both “old” and “new” media
have been used to experiment with time. By using these artists as a lead in
to the exploration of interactivity set out over the coming chapters, I do
not, however, mean to imply that they have in some way influenced these...

6 | Technology, Aesthetics, & Deleuze’s Virtual

Drawing on the last chapter’s exploration of the subjectsuperject,
whose becoming always takes place in a technological milieu,
and in which the interpenetration of human and nonhuman processes
provide the condition for the aesthetic event, we can understand interaction
as not merely involving actual objects, but also the processes and...

7 | A Unison of Becoming

Whitehead’s unison of becoming, an inherently temporal concept,
positions the world creating itself at each moment of the present.
At each moment, all the contemporaneous actual entities of the world
are in a process of becoming, just as those that came before them are
in a process of perishing. The perishing entities pass information to the...

8 | Databases and Time

In the previous chapters, my approach to interaction has been
directed by a concern with time. I have viewed interaction and the processes
of our encounters with digital systems as a temporal event, in
which every immediately present occasion, in the sense that Whitehead
understands them, draws into itself past and future occasions. In this...

Conclusion

For Whitehead, Deleuze, and Serres, time cannot be reduced
to a sequence of compartmentalized occasions set out on a line, nor can
reality be thought of as made up of inert artifacts or objects. Likewise, the
process of interacting with technology can only be thought of as a set of
relational events, where each present moment draws into itself aspects...

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